The End of Leadership as We Know It

12Conclusion: The End of Leadership in a Quantum Age

As we write this book in early 2023, the business world is abuzz with the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Like the internet before it, ChatGPT and other generative AI approaches are creating unexpected opportunities and threats for many companies. Leaders are realizing they can't run their organizations as their predecessors did. It's time for a new approach.

But in case you aren't convinced of the need for change, let us tell you about quantum computing. In a decade or so, we're going to look back on conventional computing and marvel at its limitations. David Bryant, chief experience officer in IBM's quantum computing division, uses the analogy of finding a specific person, say, Dan Fisher, in a packed stadium. A conventional computer needs to check each person at a time, in effect, asking “Are you Dan Fisher, no … are you Dan Fisher, no … are you Dan Fisher?” If it's a stadium with 40,000 seats, on average, the conventional computer has to ask 20,000 people before it finds the actual Dan Fisher. A quantum computer uses a completely different approach. “It's like broadcasting over the stadium's jumbotron, ‘Will Dan Fisher please stand up?’ The quantum computer does it in just one step, not 20,000.”¹

The arrival of quantum computing will equip us to tackle problems that were previously unsolvable. You might think, for example, that we've made good progress in designing batteries. The truth is that we don't really ...